In countries with high differentiation between academic and vocational education, an individual's future prospects are strongly determined by the educational track to which he or she is assigned. This large-scale, cross-sectional study focuses on low-performing students in academic tracks who face being moved to a vocational track. If more is…

This article will juxtapose the goals and implications of two pedagogical programmes that promote education for belonging in Israel. Representing the official knowledge of the Ministry of Education, the first is the "100 Concepts in Heritage, Zionism and Democracy" curriculum. The second, which embodies the counter knowledge produced and…

The purpose of this article is to clarify the epistemological basis of self-regulated learning. The authors note that learning to learn, a term that has pervaded education policy at EU and national levels in recent years is often conflated with self-regulated learning. As a result, there has been insufficient attention paid to learning as social…

In the past 20 years the importance of creativity as part of young people's education has increasingly been recognised. The stimulus for the growing emphasis on creativity has come from diverse sources including drives for greater national economic prosperity and enlightenment visions of young people's education. One facet of creativity…

This paper considers some of the ways that schools play a role in shaping higher education (HE) decision-making. Through their everyday practices and processes, schools can carry hidden messages about progression to HE, including choice of university. The sorts of routine aspects of school life dealt with here include events and activities,…

Language shift is the process whereby one language becomes increasingly lesser used in place of the use of another language. In Scotland, language shift is occurring for Gaelic, as English takes its place for a variety of functions in the home and wider community. Extensive literature has argued the important role that education can play in the…

This paper argues that direct control of the early years literacy curriculum recently exercised by politicians in England has made the boundaries between research, policy and practice increasingly fragile. It describes how policy came to focus most effort on the use of synthetic phonics programmes in the early years. It examines why the…

European societies have become increasingly diverse as a result of legal and illegal migration flows, and educationists are facing the challenge of how to address the presence of migrant students. In recent years, there has been increasing activity at European level in the field of intercultural education despite the principle of subsidiarity.…

This paper, based on some findings of a wider three-year study, sets forth the issue of languages used and taught in education as a dimension of inequality and highlights its implications for widening participation and access in the multilingual context of Pakistan. The paper takes secondary education in private and government schools in Pakistan…

This article subjects contemporary informed discourse on the Credit Crunch/Great Recession/Long Recession to educational analysis and deconstruction. Such pro-capitalist but not uncritical discourse is well represented by the UK "Financial Times", whose columns between 2008 and 2012 comprise most of our data. We argue that the metaphors…

In this paper, we examine how ethnically diverse, inclusive schools manage their legitimacy in an educational quasi-market. These schools are often threatened with a loss of legitimacy as ethnic majority parents perceive an ethnically diverse student population and radical pedagogical practices as signs of lower quality education. However,…

The importance of teamwork skills as part of employability has been widely acknowledged and accompanied by active research on successful cooperative learning. However, relatively few studies have focused on the effects of gender on students' group work, and only a limited number of empirical studies exist that examine students' group…

Three of the great social ambitions of educational reform since the late nineteenth century are now seriously problematical. Although education does offer individuals a way of bettering themselves, we now know that it does little to change the terms of the competition among people who start from different social classes: it probably does not, by…

In his inaugural Presidential Address, given to the BERA Conference 2013 at the University of Sussex, Ian Menter addresses a number of issues concerning educational policy and the contributions that educational research might make to policy development. As BERA approaches its fortieth anniversary, he also sets out some of the responsibilities that…

Within policy circles, graduate employability remains a problem. It is often understood as an individual phenomenon, overlooking the influence of the organisation of higher education on the competition for graduate jobs. This article explores and compares how graduate employability is socially constructed within Great Britain and the Netherlands.…